The Romance of Reunion

Nina Silber. The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

The story of Reconstruction, the Redemption of white rule, and the eventual "reunion" of the Northern and Southern whites a few decades after the end of the Civil War--at the expense of African-Americans, who were pointedly "written out" of the national narrative--is frequently told from the Southern point of view. It was the defeated former Confederacy which had to reckon with the specter of defeat, the unsettling of old racial caste norms, the newly enfranchised African-American vote, the attitude of victorious Northerners, and the prospect of having to redefine their place in the very country they fought four years to dismember.

Silber looks at the story from the perspective of the white North. She finds that in many ways, this is actually a gender history--Northerners, as she points out, had their own anxieties and fears to work out, and they did so partly by casting the South as a feminine contrast to their own presumed masculine mastery and strength.

At the same time, white Northern attitudes towards freedmen would shift along with anxieties about working class agitation and concerns about increased levels of immigration--the notion that Southern whites might understand "the Negro problem" best allowed Northerners both to cease worrying about the consequences of abandoning Reconstruction and it promises, and to allow Southern whites a subsidiary but respectable role in enforcing social and political harmony in "their" section of the country.